


Nails and Knuckles

by elle_stone



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Remus's Lost Years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-04
Updated: 2012-05-04
Packaged: 2017-11-04 19:22:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/397317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now William sits across from him, just sits, silent, and Remus tries to swallow down the urge to hit him. In his mind he is thinking about the prison again.  Sirius's prison.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nails and Knuckles

**Author's Note:**

> Written in October 2007 for prompt number nine, Autumn by Malcolm Middleton, at the barefootboys community on livejournal.

It’s 1986, almost 1987, and the city is taunting him. Winds rattle his window in the middle of the night and wake him from his carefully balanced sleep. Any little thing disrupts him. He gets up and wanders through the cramped rooms, bare and dirty in the corners, tries to make himself tea but drinks it too quickly and burns his tongue.

William wakes up half an hour later and comes to sit across from him, but Remus can’t look into his face because he hates him. William calls his hair midnight black. Remus has seen blacker. He thinks he has thin fingers, but Remus knows the forms that true aristocracy breeds. He smokes cigarettes all day and says he is waiting to die but Remus knows he is waiting to live.

Now William sits across from him, just sits, silent, and Remus tries to swallow down the urge to hit him. In his mind he is thinking about the prison again. Sirius’s prison. He is thinking about the ocean that he has put between them. He is thinking about the last night, cold autumn chill just like this one. He is thinking how he will never leave that bed, how he will never touch any other skin but that skin, how he will never be able to love like he loved then or hate like he hated then, how everything in his life is dull.

“Is this about—?” William starts to ask.

“No,” Remus barks. “I don’t care.”

He doesn’t, but William assumes he is lying.

“I told you—I mean—it was just sex—”

Remus doesn’t have the heart to tell him that that is all they are, too. He waits for William to run out of words. He is too young, and his eyes too skittish. He never looks Remus in the face.

“Sometimes,” Remus says, through his own gritted teeth, “I just hate—”

And how can he finish?

William is waiting, staring at Remus’s fingers, which clench around his mug, wanting to break it and spill burning liquid over his nails and knuckles.

“I hate fucking fall,” he says. “I hate the wind and the leaves and the smell of the city and—”

He goes on, doesn’t remember later exactly how far. At some point, William stands up, and tries to hug him from behind, tries to be comforting. Remus doesn’t feel better but doesn’t have the strength to break away. Eventually his words string out to nonsense, and then silence.

If he could he would throw himself into the sea, straight into the ocean, and swim and swim until he got to Azkaban, and scale the walls and wander the dirty prison corridors. He would face the Dementors with no fears left for them to feast on. He would find the cell and he would pick up the remnants of whatever once-human being is there, his love, his love so close to hate he can no longer tell the difference. He would. But if he could not swim far enough, if he has really forced a distance between them that not even this desperation could bridge, then he would let himself drown, out there somewhere in the Atlantic, the water slowly filling his lungs until he becomes heavy and drifts downward to the ocean floor, careless, too tired to go on.


End file.
